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I wonder how many people have had a stab at Nitro. I've been keen to look at it one day... and I've heard some people speak highly of it. However it hasn't have the media attention and doesn't have the documentation / community supporting it.

If I remember rightly, it sort of is like the Apache Cocoon architecture of "modal" programming.

Are there any good examples you could highlight, and any good sites that use it?

I'd be interested in specifics too. Is there a Nitro equivalent to the "install Rails and build a cookbook in an hour" tutorial?

I read a little and found Why might I use Nitro instead of Rails. Filled with a lot of jargon, but a few interesting points managed to seep through. The "Programmatic xhtml rendering" on that page looked particularly interesting to me.

Using your unpaid time to add free content to SitePoint Pty Ltd's portfolio?

I understand the mechanics of it, I just haven't tried it and have no sense of whether it pragmatically works better than a template-based approach.

I think it's just a matter of preference and need. For example, if you were building a Ruby class to output XML that wasn't tied to the web for anything in particular (just a general-use class that could go anywhere), then the XML Builder is probably the way to go. Otherwise it's what you're more comfortable with.

Nitro is a very nice web framework. The documentation is lacking but it lets you start simpler than rails and get as complex as you want. The main difference is in the OR Mapper. Rails has ActiveRecord which creates ruby accessors in your model classes based on the structure of the database table. While Og( the nitro ORM) goes the other way. In Nitro you define the columns in your ruby classes and they are automatically persisted to the db. You don't ever touch SQL unless you want to optimize a query. Kind of like ActiveRecord's migrations, og classes look similar. Og makes it easy to write plain ruby objects and then add persistence later with a few lines of code. Its a fundementaly different way of doing ORM than the way rails does it but each has their advantages. Og is well worth looking into but in the end I prefer rails to nitro. The lack of documentation is my main peeve with nitro. Nitro is a very capable framework though and the ruby programming that makes up the framework is very nice and has a lot to be learned from.